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1 INTRODUCTION

1.1 The Global Context: Fragmentation vs. Integration

The institutional architecture of climate governance has become a central problem in contemporary environmental law, a problem that this article addresses through the lens of China’s recent legislative experiment in environmental codification. Jurisdictions including the United Kingdom¹ , France² , and the European Union (EU)³ have each enacted independent legislative frameworks establishing carbon budgets, emission reduction targets, and compliance pathways. However, as deep decarbonization intensifies, the stand-alone statute model is revealing systemic institutional limitations. The core structural deficit lies in the disconnection between climate governance regimes and established pollution prevention frameworks, a disconnection manifest in divergent regulatory institutions, incompatible legal principles, and uncoordinated enforcement mechanisms, collectively producing what comparative law scholars have termed “normative fragmentation” (Keohane & Victor, 2011).

Western legal scholarship has long pointed out the issue of “fragmentation” in modern environmental governance. Fisher, Lange, and Scotford (2019) have documented that environmental regulation, operating across multiple agencies, governance levels, and regulatory instruments, generates substantial institutional coordination costs that undermine overall governance effectiveness. Boyd (2010) characterizes international and domestic climate regimes as an institutional “assemblage”, an arrangement in which functionally coexisting norms and mechanisms lack unified structural integration, generating norm collisions and governance gaps. Peel and Osofsky (2015) further emphasize the absence of coordination mechanisms between climate statutes, which operate independently through target-setting and market mechanisms, and traditional environmental codes grounded in permitting and administrative supervision, a structural misalignment that generates efficiency losses and regulatory displacement in practice (Savaresi & Setzer, 2022).

From a scientific standpoint, the synergy potential between climate governance and pollution control is substantial. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2022) highlights that most greenhouse gas mitigation measures simultaneously improve environmental quality and reduce public health risks, underscoring the scientific incoherence of maintaining institutional separation between the two domains. Yet, stand-alone climate statutes, despite their advantages in target-setting and accountability, have in practice hardened this separation: when climate governance operates through carbon markets and national targets while pollution control advances through administrative permits and supervision, the two systems run on parallel regulatory tracks with no intrinsic interlocking mechanisms. The Anthropocene framing further underscores the analytical inadequacy of maintaining institutional boundaries between climate change and pollution regulation, as both are manifestations of the same planetary-scale anthropogenic pressures (Kotzé, 2019). Traditional institutional separation is no longer commensurate with Earth system governance demands, a recognition that generates scholarly pressure for structural legislative integration.

Against this backdrop, the Ecological and Environmental Code of the People’s Republic of China (Ecological and Environmental Code)⁴ represents a distinctive legislative response to the fragmentation problem. Rather than enacting a stand-alone climate statute, the Ecological and Environmental Code embeds carbon emission management within planning, permitting, supervision, and liability frameworks, constructing structural linkages with pollution control within a unified legal system. As comparative scholarly analysis of this approach remains in its early stages, this article examines precisely how climate governance is institutionally embedded within the codification process, what mechanisms sustain its implementation effectiveness, and what implications this holds for the comparative scholarship on climate governance pluralism.

1.2 China’s Legislative Pivot

As the world’s largest carbon emitter, China has explicitly set the “dual carbon” goals of peaking carbon emissions before 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality before 2060. This has driven a transition from policy-based climate governance toward a rule-of-law-based framework. Establishing a stable legal foundation for long-term emission reduction has become a central challenge. Unlike jurisdictions such as the United Kingdom or Germany⁵, which have enacted standalone climate legislation, China has chosen to consolidate dispersed environmental provisions into a unified Ecological and Environmental Code through systematic integration and restructuring (Lü, 2020). This legislative choice is grounded in three institutional considerations.

First, carbon emissions and traditional pollutants share a common source: the combustion of fossil fuels produces both carbon dioxide (CO2) and pollutants such as sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxides (NOX). Placing climate governance and pollution prevention within separate legal frameworks would artificially segregate what is physically an integrated emission process, foregoing the governance synergies that integrated regulation makes possible at each stage: source control, process management, and end-of-pipe regulation.

Second, from an administrative governance perspective, China’s climate governance has historically suffered from fragmented institutional responsibilities, a manifestation of “fragmented authoritarianism” (Lieberthal & Oksenberg, 1988). Carbon emission management was primarily the responsibility of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), while pollution prevention fell under the jurisdiction of what is now the Ministry of Ecology and Environment (MEE). The 2018 institutional reform transferred most of the regulatory and enforcement functions related to climate change and GHG emission reduction to the MEE, a consolidation that created the institutional precondition for unified codification. Enacting a separate climate statute post-reform would risk reconstituting multi-departmental divisions and functional overlaps. Integrating climate governance into the existing ecological and environmental management system through codification therefore achieves unified responsibilities and concentrated administrative authority, substantially reducing coordination costs.

Third, from the perspective of legal efficacy, China’s environmental law system has developed a relatively mature enforcement infrastructure encompassing emission permits, daily continuous penalties, administrative detention, and ecological damage compensation systems. Embedding climate objectives within the Ecological and Environmental Code allows direct mobilization of this existing institutional toolkit, enabling carbon emission management to operate within the same enforcement framework as pollution control, thereby substantially enhancing the legal certainty and coercive rigidity of climate implementation, without the institutional startup costs that a new standalone statute would require.

The codification pathway thus addresses the long-term institutional stability required by the “dual carbon” goals and the broader structural challenge of integrating climate and pollution governance within a unified legal framework. Unlike the specialized standalone statute pathway, embedding climate rules within the Ecological and Environmental Code creates inherent linkages between carbon management and adjacent institutional domains, such as pollution prevention and resource utilization, spatial planning, that a separate climate law would leave disconnected. This approach both consolidates the tradition of administrative dominance in China’s environmental governance and provides a more systematic statutory foundation for climate implementation. It also offers a potentially transferable institutional model for large developing economies that possess strong administrative capacity but lack the mature market institutions and independent judiciaries that EU-style climate constitutionalism presupposes. Prior to codification, China had already developed a range of policy instruments addressing carbon markets, circular economy, energy efficiency, and green transformation, which collectively laid the groundwork for statutory integration (National Development and Reform Commission, 2017; The Communist Party of China Central Committee & State Council, 2024).

1.3 Methodology and Roadmap

This article employs doctrinal legal analysis as its primary method, undertaking a systematic structural examination of the climate governance provisions of the Ecological and Environmental Code and their internal institutional logic. The research focuses on how climate rules are embedded within the existing environmental law system and how alignment is achieved in terms of normative structure, allocation of administrative powers, and enforcement mechanisms. Regarding the institutional background, this article will also integrate relevant policy documents on the “dual carbon” goals and measures from the institutional reform to analyze the process of climate governance transitioning from policy orientation towards legalization and institutionalization.

In terms of comparative methodology, this article selects the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) and the US Clean Air Act as reference objects. These comparators are selected on deliberate methodological grounds. The EU ETS is a globally long-running and institutionally mature carbon market mechanism, with its institutional basis originating from the 2003 EU Emissions Trading Directive and subsequent revisions. It represents a pathway to constructing climate governance institutions centered on market-based instruments. In contrast, the US Clean Air Act presents a different legislative logic, incorporating GHGs into an existing environmental legislative framework, especially following Massachusetts v. EPA⁶, where GHGs were formally brought under its regulatory scope⁷. These two instantiate different legislative logics, “functional specialization” versus “systemic incorporation”, providing a structured basis for comparison along three analytical dimensions: degree of institutional integration between climate and pollution governance; structure of the regulatory instrument mix (market-based vs. administrative); and enforcement coordination mechanisms and their accountability structures.

Regarding sources, this article primarily relies on the published text of the Ecological and Environmental Code and its legislative explanations, as well as policy documents related to carbon peaking and carbon neutrality. It will also refer to normative documents of the national carbon emission trading scheme to illustrate the institutionalization progress of climate governance in practice. The comparative part draws on the EU ETS Directive, the US Clean Air Act and relevant judicial precedents, combined with IPCC scientific reports on the co-benefits of climate mitigation and air quality, to ensure analysis is based on official legal texts and authoritative literature.

Based on the above research design, this article makes three theoretical contributions. First, it develops the concept of codified climate governance integration, distinguishing between embedded and reconstructive legislative logics. Second, it demonstrates that administrative dominance can generate governance effectiveness in the absence of mature markets and judicial institutions. Third, it contributes to the governance pluralism debate by providing a detailed institutional analysis of a non-constitutionalist climate governance pathway.

The article proceeds in seven parts. Part I situates the fragmentation problem in global climate governance and introduces China’s codification response. Part II traces the historical and institutional evolution from China’s dual-track administrative structure to unified codification. Part III analyses the structural innovation of the dedicated “Green and Low-Carbon Development” book, including its market mechanisms and technology mandates. Part IV examines how climate governance is instrumentally embedded within existing regulatory tools, spatial planning, Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), and emission permits. Part V analyses the political accountability and enforcement mechanisms that operationalize the Ecological and Environmental Code’s climate provisions. Part VI offers a critical assessment of the model’s implementation challenges and inherent limitations. Part VII concludes with theoretical synthesis, global comparative implications, and directions for future research.

2 From Policy to Statute: The Institutional Logic of Synergy

The integration of climate governance into the Ecological and Environmental Code is not merely a technical legislative exercise; it represents the institutional crystallization of more than a decade of administrative reform, functional consolidation, and policy experimentation. It signifies a departure from the conventional pathway of enacting standalone climate legislation, moving instead toward a more integrative governance model. This legislative choice did not emerge in isolation. It is the normative consolidation of administrative reforms and policy experiments accumulated since at least 2015. To fully understand the theoretical logic of “synergistic governance” within the Ecological and Environmental Code, it is necessary to move beyond a static reading of statutory texts and examine the underlying institutional trajectory. This Part therefore traces the transition from a dual-track system, where pollution control and climate governance were administratively segregated, to a unified framework achieved through the 2018 functional consolidation and subsequent codification.

2.1 Historical Evolution: From “Dual Tracks” to Merger

Prior to the 2018 institutional reform, China’s environmental governance was characterized by a dual-track structure separating “pollution control” and “climate change governance”. Pollution control was administered by the former Ministry of Environmental Protection, relying primarily on regulatory tools such as pollutant discharge permits, total emission control, and end-of-pipe treatment. In contrast, climate policy was led by the NDRC, focusing on energy restructuring, industrial planning, and macroeconomic coordination. This functional division institutionally embedded a structural separation between “environmental protection” and “development planning”, each associated with distinct policy objectives and regulatory instruments. The MEP focused on end-of-pipe pollutant control; the NDRC on energy security and industrial growth targets.

In practice, although each track achieved progress within its respective domain, coordination problems gradually became apparent. As the macro-economic management department, the NDRC embedded energy governance primarily within the framework of energy security and industrial development. The environmental protection department, meanwhile, mainly focused on pollutant emission control and environmental quality improvement. The divergence between development-oriented and protection-oriented logics resulted in a persistent lack of coordination between carbon mitigation policies and pollution control measures in both design and implementation. Before 2018, China’s environmental governance exhibited the defining characteristics of “fragmented authoritarianism”; despite a highly centralized political system, the distribution of responsibilities across functionally distinct agencies generated conflicting objectives, fragmented regulatory instruments, and reduced enforcement efficiency (Lieberthal & Oksenberg, 1988; Kostka, 2016). These structural tensions were particularly pronounced at the local level, where overlapping authority and inconsistent incentives further exacerbated implementation gaps. From an institutional perspective, climate governance long relied on planning instruments lacking binding legal force, making it difficult to integrate with the regulatory system for conventional pollutants. This institutional arrangement reinforced the separation between “carbon” and “pollution” (Wang, 2018).

From a governance theory standpoint, the dual-track system reflects a rationale of functional differentiation. As scientific understanding deepened, however, the internal tension between this institutional arrangement and the physical reality of co-emission has become increasingly acute: fossil fuel combustion is simultaneously the primary source of GHG emissions and a dominant contributor to air pollution. Empirical studies confirm that coordinated mitigation strategies generate substantial synergistic co-benefits (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2022), while policy fragmentation typically produces efficiency losses through duplicated monitoring infrastructure, conflicting incentives, and regulatory blind spots. This tension between scientific “homology” and institutional “separation” constituted the internal driving force pushing for institutional adjustment.

The 2018 Plan for Deepening Reform of Party and State Institutions (The Communist Party of China Central Committee & State Council, 2018) explicitly transferred the responsibilities for climate change and GHG emission reduction from the NDRC to the newly established MEE. This was not merely an administrative reallocation but a fundamental repositioning of climate governance, shifting it from the framework of macro-level development planning, with its growth-oriented objectives, to the framework of environmental rule of law, with its compliance-oriented enforcement logic. This institutional consolidation constituted the structural precondition for codified climate governance integration. Academia generally agrees that this institutional integration provided the institutional foundation for “synergistic enhancement of pollution reduction and carbon mitigation”. Unified functions effectively eliminated the target separation between the development and environmental departments, enabling carbon emission management and traditional pollutant control to achieve tool sharing and policy coordination within the same regulatory
system.

During this transitional period, policy documents played a critical bridging role. The 2021 Opinions on Deepening the Fight Against Pollution (The Communist Party of China Central Committee & State Council, 2021) formally established “synergistic enhancement of pollution reduction and carbon mitigation” as a governance principle, representing an important step towards legalization and institutionalization (Wang, 2018). However, its normative effect remained confined to soft policy coordination: absent statutory anchoring, these principles lacked the enforcement mechanisms, institutional certainty, and justiciability that codification alone could provide. Only institutional consolidation, achieved through the 2018 reform and subsequent statutory enactment, could transform this policy aspiration into a legally binding and enforceable governance framework. In this sense, the 2018 reform constituted a structural precondition for codified integration. Without functional unification, it would have been difficult to achieve systematic coherence between climate provisions and pollution control rules within a legislative framework. The transition from dual-track separation to unified regulation, therefore, not only improved administrative efficiency but also laid the institutional foundation for incorporating climate governance into a unified legal system within the Ecological and Environmental Code.

2.2 Legal Principles: Article 5 as the Cornerstone

Article 5 of the Ecological and Environmental Code is one of its foundational principles, explicitly mandating that industrial restructuring, pollution prevention, ecological protection, and climate change response be coordinated, and that carbon reduction, pollution reduction, ecological improvement, and economic growth be synergistically pursued. This provision not only emphasizes the synergistic relationship between climate change governance and pollution prevention but also clarifies the mutually reinforcing role of industrial structure optimization and green growth objectives. More importantly, it establishes a unified normative framework and systematic legal guidance for China’s future ecological and environmental governance.

This provision has multi-layered normative effects. First, as a general principle within the Ecological and Environmental Code’s General Provisions, Article 5 functions far beyond a mere declaration of values. In the hierarchical structure of China’s legal system, general principles occupy a superior position within the normative structure, guiding and constraining the interpretation of specific institutional provisions at lower levels, the formulation of administrative regulations, and the application of law in judicial adjudication. According to the general logic of administrative law, lower-level norms must be consistent with superior laws, and when administrative organs formulate departmental rules or normative documents, they should take legal principles as the starting point for interpretation. Thus, Article 5, by setting review standards for administrative acts, transforms macro-level institutional guidance into continuous constraints on administrative discretion, achieving a transition, within the normative structure, from aspirational “advocacy” to binding legal obligation.

Second, at the practical level, principal provisions operate through their incorporation into administrative decision-making procedures and performance evaluation systems. During the “dual-track” period, pollutant emission control and carbon emission control management belonged to separate administrative evaluation frameworks, generating target separation and inconsistent regulatory standards. Once “synergistic promotion of pollution reduction and carbon mitigation” is codified as a legal principle, administrative authorities are legally required to consider both pollutant and carbon emission dimensions simultaneously when formulating sectoral emission reduction plans, setting industrial access conditions, or adopting regional development strategies. This effectively creates a mandatory institutional linkage between environmental assessment and carbon assessment. Consequently, if an administrative organ neglects the review of either factor in its decision-making, it may constitute a breach of statutory duty. As a result, the principle not only guides interpretation but also reshapes administrative decision-making pathways by embedding procedural constraints and reducing selective enforcement. Administrative agencies and courts may also invoke the “synergy principle” when interpreting policies and applying the law. In cases of normative conflict, the principle provides a coordinating framework to ensure consistency between climate action and pollution control.

Unlike the “polluter pays principle” and the “precautionary principle”, the dominant structuring principles of Western environmental law, the “synergy principle” is not primarily concerned with liability allocation or ex ante risk prevention. Rather, it seeks to reconstrue the administrative decision-making framework by mandating that multiple environmental and developmental objectives be pursued concurrently within a unified normative system. This represents a shift from a “point-to-point” regulatory logic, which addresses discrete risks or pollution sources, to a “system-to-system” logic that prioritizes institutional coordination across governance domains.

Therefore, explicitly designating “synergy” as an interpretive principle in the Ecological and Environmental Code means it has been elevated from policy advocacy to a legally binding provision. It not only provides directional guidance conceptually but also transforms, through hierarchical control of norms, procedural embedding in administrative decisions, and institutional channels for legality review, into normative force that can substantively influence administrative behavior, thereby systematically reshaping the overall operational logic of ecological and environmental governance.

2.3 The “Code” Approach: Why Codification Matters

The fundamental distinction between codification and standalone legislation lies in the former’s pursuit of structural reorganization and hierarchical clarification within the legal system. The Ecological and Environmental Code did not adopt a “comprehensive codification” model of starting anew but chose the more balanced “moderate codification” pathway (Lü, 2021). This model systematically integrates, revises, and improves scattered ecological and environmental legal norms to form a logically rigorous and systematically coordinated comprehensive code while retaining necessary flexibility. Its goal is to achieve the scientification and systematization of ecological and environmental law, eliminate conflicts and loopholes between legal norms, and enhance the legal efficacy of ecological and environmental governance (Lü, 2023).

The choice of moderate codification is rooted in the inherent characteristics of environmental law. Environmental relations are highly dynamic and technically complex; regulatory targets and standards evolve continuously with scientific advancement. Embedding highly technical norms directly into the Ecological and Environmental Code would increase amendment costs and reduce the system’s adaptability to emerging risks. One of the core functions of codification is therefore to reduce institutional transaction costs arising from complexity through a degree of normative abstraction. Moderate codification strikes a balance between systemic stability and regulatory flexibility. Fundamental principles and procedural frameworks are established at the codified level, while detailed technical standards are delegated to subordinate regulations. This layered design follows the “exclusion principle” of codification, whereby highly technical and frequently changing provisions are excluded from the core text. In doing so, it enhances legal certainty while preserving space for institutional evolution.

In this sense, codification is not merely a tool for resolving normative conflicts or addressing legislative fragmentation, but also constitutes a deeper form of institutional restructuring. Prior to reform, pollution control and climate governance existed within separate systems, resulting in normative fragmentation. This normative fragmentation in China’s environmental governance system is specifically manifested as significant differences between pollution prevention and climate governance in terms of target setting, tool systems, and operational logic. Climate governance, in particular, long relied on policy planning or administrative rules, lacking statutory anchoring. This weakened its stability and effectiveness. Through codification, the objective of synergistic pollution reduction and carbon mitigation is elevated to the statutory level, thereby acquiring a clear legal foundation. The establishment of a statutory basis not only endows climate governance with the support of national legal authority, enhancing institutional legitimacy, but also makes related obligations potentially subject to judicial review, thereby obtaining justiciability. After policy objectives are transformed into statutory responsibilities, administrative organs face clearer legal obligations, the normative structure constrains discretion, and the possibility of selective implementation is reduced. Compared to the previous governance model relying on policy documents, once enacted, the Ecological and Environmental Code will endow relevant institutions with stronger normative force and promote the shift of climate governance from policy guidance to legally binding implementation.

More importantly, codification performs a “meta-regulatory” function. By establishing a unified framework of principles and procedural interfaces, it creates an institutional platform on which previously segregated regulatory tools, emission permits, EIA and carbon market mechanisms can be coordinated within the same normative architecture. On this platform, the pollutant discharge permit system, EIA system, and carbon emission management system, originally belonging to different systems, can thus be coordinated within the same legal framework, thereby procedurally moving the originally relatively independent environmental assessment and carbon assessment from independence to hard linkage. The key to pollution-carbon reduction synergy lies in the organic integration of core mechanisms such as carbon assessment and EIA, and carbon quota allocation and emission permits. This integration is not a simple superimposition but the establishment of “linking” rules for the two types of systems through the Ecological and Environmental Code, providing a superior legal basis for subsequent specific implementation. Such coordination intends to minimize, through the construction of a normative platform, the “tragedy of the commons”-type governance failure caused by regulatory overlap, responsibility shifting, or incentive incompatibility due to dispersed regulatory powers.

Ultimately, codification marks the transition of climate governance from the policy coordination phase to the institutionalization phase. What codification brings is not a simple compilation of norms but, through elevating normative levels, clarifying liability structures, and reshaping procedural interfaces, a transformation from fragmented governance to structural integration. Compared with standalone legislative approaches, codification is more conducive to coordinating multiple policy objectives within the same normative framework, enabling pollution reduction and carbon mitigation to form continuous interaction at the institutional level. The significance of this transformation lies not only in alleviating the problem of legislative fragmentation but also, by constructing a unified yet open structural framework, in both elevating the normative level of climate governance and reserving institutional response space for future environmental risks and technological changes, thereby providing a more stable institutional foundation for multi-objective environmental regulation.

3 Structural Integration: The “Green and Low-Carbon Development” Book

Having elucidated how the synergy principle is grounded in institutional evolution and codified legal architecture, it is now necessary to examine how this principle is operationalized through the Ecological and Environmental Code’s specific structural and substantive provisions. The Ecological and Environmental Code does not merely state abstract principles. Through its unique organizational structure and innovative tools, it systematically translates the “synergistic enhancement of pollution reduction and carbon mitigation” into operational, implementable legal norms. This chapter will focus on analyzing the Ecological and Environmental Code’s integration strategies at the structural level, scrutinizing its groundbreaking institutional arrangements. It will specifically elaborate on how this section embeds national climate strategy objectives firmly within the legal enforcement framework through mechanisms such as establishing market-based approaches and setting mandatory technical and industrial requirements. This approach facilitates a substantive leap from conceptual vision to practical implementation in governance.

3.1 A Dedicated Book: Elevating Climate Goals

The Ecological and Environmental Code specifically establishes a “Green and Low-Carbon Development” book in Part Four, thereby elevating climate governance to an independent structural component within the codified system. Compared to environmental legislation in other countries, which typically centers on pollution control, environmental permits, or natural resource protection, the Ecological and Environmental Code, featuring an independent “Green and Low-Carbon Development” book, is a significant highlight of this compilation (Lü, 2026). To understand the deeper meaning of this arrangement, it must be viewed within the macro-framework of the evolutionary stages of environmental codification. Traditional environmental codes are mostly centered on pollution control, aiming to respond to local environmental externalities in the industrialization process. As climate change becomes a core issue in global governance, the regulatory scope of environmental law has expanded from local pollution to systemic carbon emission risks. Against this backdrop, establishing climate objectives as an independent chapter can be seen as the institutional expression of environmental codification moving from the “pollution control stage” to the “carbon neutrality-oriented stage”. The analytical significance of the dedicated “Green and Low-Carbon Development” book thus lies not merely in structural arrangement but in the elevation of climate governance to a stable, constitutively distinct normative status within the Ecological and Environmental Code’s legislative hierarchy, a status that was previously unavailable under a policy-document-only regime. It addresses the long-standing issue of climate policy being dependent on policy frameworks and lacking legal anchoring (Riahi et al., 2022).

The institutional value of an independent chapter ultimately needs to be realized through specific provisions. This chapter transforms national-level climate objectives into binding legal obligations, advancing climate governance from policy guidance to legal implementation. For example, Article 1032 of the Ecological and Environmental Code provides for a total carbon emission and intensity control system. This provision offers a key legal tool for implementing the national “dual carbon” goals. It reflects the policy trajectory of “prioritizing intensity control in the near term, supplemented by total volume control, with a gradual transition to comprehensive total control” (General Office of the State Council, 2024), and achieves effective cohesion between policy and law. Compared to merely setting targets at the planning level, incorporating the control system into the Ecological and Environmental Code significantly enhances normative stability and institutional certainty. From a governance theory perspective, this institutional arrangement strengthens the mechanism of “legitimacy through measurement”. Measurability and data transparency are important conditions for climate policy to obtain institutional legitimacy. The legalization of this control system thus achieves structural alignment between pollution reduction and carbon mitigation at both the normative and enforcement levels, translating carbon data from a statistical indicator into a legally consequential governance instrument. Local governments thus face legally binding indicators, fundamentally strengthening the enforcement rigidity and accountability foundation of climate governance.

In addition, Article 1025 of the Ecological and Environmental Code emphasizes the principle of “equal emphasis on mitigation and adaptation”, reflecting the comprehensiveness of China’s climate governance, focusing both on emission reduction and on enhancing climate adaptation capacity. The IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2022) identifies the integration of mitigation and adaptation as a critical pathway for managing compound climate risks. The Ecological and Environmental Code operationalizes this integration through mandatory provisions: Article 946 requires incorporating climate risk assessment into urban infrastructure planning, while Article 947 stipulates adaptation measures for agricultural production systems. These provisions are analytically significant because they extend the Ecological and Environmental Code’s regulatory reach beyond emission sources to encompass climate vulnerability, a scope expansion that distinguishes the Chinese model from EU and US frameworks, which do not formally integrate adaptation requirements within their primary emission reduction statutes. Furthermore, the Ecological and Environmental Code also establishes and improves “monitoring and early warning” and “disaster prevention and mitigation” mechanisms, meaning that the planning and construction of key infrastructure such as water conservancy projects, coastal protection facilities, and transportation arteries must legally undergo climate risk assessment and adopt corresponding adaptation measures. These provisions not only define state responsibilities but also provide clear expectations for market actors. When climate resilience standards are codified in sectors such as agriculture and infrastructure, enterprises can plan compliance investments as deterministic factors in their business decisions, no longer facing uncertainty from frequent policy adjustments. Such clear legal rules effectively reduce the institutional costs for market actors. More critically, the Ecological and Environmental Code internalizes climate risk from an externality problem into enterprises’actual costs, directly linking climate performance to market valuation, financing costs, and industry access (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2021). When financial institutions incorporate climate compliance into credit approval and listed companies must fulfill information disclosure obligations, market actors gain realistic motivation for proactive transformation, forming a virtuous interaction between low-carbon development and climate adaptation in practice.

Therefore, the independent “Green and Low-Carbon Development” book is not merely an adjustment of system structure but marks climate governance obtaining independent and stable institutional status within the legal system. By clarifying legal responsibilities, institutional frameworks, and procedural requirements, it transforms climate objectives from policy expression into measurable, monitorable, and enforceable legal arrangements, while reserving institutional response space for future environmental and climate risk changes.

3.2 Market Mechanisms Within the Code

China’s environmental governance has historically been characterized by administrative dominance, a model with demonstrated implementation capacity in pollution control (Wang, 2013), but structural incentive deficiencies when confronting long-term, structural transformation challenges that climate governance requires (Kostka, 2016). The Ecological and Environmental Code does not weaken administrative authority but introduces and institutionalizes market mechanisms within the administrative framework, thereby forming a “hybrid regulatory model” that integrates administrative authority and market incentives. This model does not replace administration with markets but embeds market tools within the administrative hierarchy, making them operate within clearly defined legal boundaries.

The clarification of legal status entails the hardening of obligations. Article 1037 of the Ecological and Environmental Code formally establishes the legal status of the national carbon emission trading market. Codification itself cannot fundamentally resolve current structural problems, such as low carbon prices and insufficient liquidity in China, in the short term. However, its genuine institutional value lies in providing legal certainty and long-term predictability, thereby reducing transaction costs in institutional operation. Once carbon emission rights are established as a statutory system, their quota allocation, compliance obligations, and liability for breach will obtain stable statutory anchoring, no longer relying entirely on administrative documents or departmental regulations.

The stability of the legal system is particularly crucial for capital-intensive investments. Taking the power industry as an example, when enterprises evaluate Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) projects, they typically face significant long-term asset specificity risks, with investment payback periods for such facilities lasting up to 20 years, and project returns highly dependent on the continued existence of future carbon constraint policies. If carbon constraints remains only at the level of administrative policy targets, subject to revision at each planning cycle, enterprises investing in long-payback assets face the classic “hold-up problem” (Williamson, 1985): the risk that the policy environment will shift opportunistically after sunk costs have been committed, reducing the expected return on the investment ex post. Codification, by endowing carbon constraints with legal attributes, effectively enhances credible expectations of institutional stability, thereby providing a more reliable institutional environment for high-capital investments. In practice, as the national carbon market expands to cover sectors such as steel, firms have begun incorporating future carbon costs into long-term investment decisions. Carbon pricing thus evolves from a flexible budgeting parameter into a binding constraint in asset valuation, signaling a shift from passive compliance to strategic low-carbon transformation.

At the same time, Article 1038 establishes the GHG voluntary emission reduction trading mechanism as a statutory supporting system. Its core function is to resolve the exclusivity and transferability problems of carbon sink assets through statutory rights confirmation, a necessary condition for carbon sinks to function as tradable property rather than merely as unregistered environmental services. Only when carbon sink projects are supported by clearly defined ownership rights and registration systems can they function as tradable assets. According to the Carbon Emission Rights Registration Management Rules (Ministry of Ecology and Environment, 2021a), registered information serves as the definitive basis for determining quota ownership, providing essential legal infrastructure for carbon trading. Codification thus transforms previously ambiguous ecological benefits into quantifiable, registrable, and transferable property rights. Take the Yunnan forestry carbon sink project as an example. Certified Emission Reductions (CCERs) complete rights determination through the national registration system and enter the trading system for market circulation (Ministry of Ecology and Environment, 2023). At the institutional design level, part of the project proceeds is used for sharing with communities and forest farmers, thereby forming a benefit-sharing mechanism constructed within the legal framework. The core function of such rights confirmation arrangements is to place the return on social capital investment and community interests under the same institutional structure, thereby normatively responding to the institutional risk of ecological benefits being acquired by external actors without charge. This pathway has inherent consistency with the international practice of Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) theory and Nature-based Solutions (NbS), reflecting the localization and institutional response of China’s codification exploration to global environmental governance rules.

Further worth exploring is the Ecological and Environmental Code’s institutional choice regarding the relationship between carbon emission rights and existing pollutant discharge rights. Article 167 retains the pollutant emission rights trading system, forming a dual-track structure with carbon emission rights and pollutant discharge rights operating in parallel. This arrangement profoundly responds to the structural differences between the two types of pollutants in terms of spatial-temporal distribution and environmental justice dimensions. Local pollutants such as sulfur dioxide exhibit geographically concentrated impacts, whereas carbon dioxide is a globally cumulative pollutant with transboundary effects. Maintaining parallel systems compels firms to coordinate emission reductions at the source, thereby improving overall regulatory efficiency. It also reflects the core logic that market-based instruments, embedded within an administratively driven structure, serve as a key instrument for enhancing governance efficiency and achieving synergy among multiple environmental objectives.

The dual-track system is not a simple superimposition of regulatory costs but a mechanism that, under simultaneous carbon and pollutant constraints, drives enterprises toward synergistic optimization. This structure reflects the core codification logic: market mechanisms are not external to the administrative system but are constitutively embedded within it as governance instruments, enabling productive coupling of administrative efficiency and market flexibility. Therefore, market mechanisms in the Ecological and Environmental Code should be understood as institutionalized regulatory restructuring, not simple market expansion. Through legal certainty, property rights clarification, and long-term expectation stabilization, they drive enterprises from passive compliance towards strategic low-carbon transformation, while simultaneously achieving multi-environmental objective synergistic governance within the administrative dominance framework.

3.3 Technological and Industrial Mandates

Another distinctive feature of the Ecological and Environmental Code lies in its incorporation of explicit technological and industrial mandates, reflecting the role of environmental law in guiding structural economic transformation. From a theoretical perspective, this approach may be characterized as developmental environmentalism, whereby the state simultaneously strengthens environmental regulation and actively steers industrial upgrading. Through juridification of industrial policy, the process by which policy objectives are converted into statutory authorizations, the Ecological and Environmental Code provides clear legal grounding for state intervention in production processes and innovation pathways, thereby establishing a stable institutional foundation for technological advancement and industrial restructuring. Within this framework, law does not merely constrain emissions; it also promotes technological progress and structural transformation. Such a codification pathway also has important legitimacy implications. Traditionally, when administrative organs directly intervene in enterprise technology routes to promote industrial transformation, they often easily trigger disputes over power boundaries and legitimacy. When these policy objectives are incorporated into the Ecological and Environmental Code system, however, relevant measures obtain clear legal authorization, thereby providing a stable institutional foundation for the government to promote technological upgrading and industrial adjustment.

The Ecological and Environmental Code particularly emphasizes industrial restructuring as an important tool for synergistic governance of pollution reduction and carbon mitigation. For example, Article 944 stipulates that the state shall promote the green and low-carbon transformation of key industries. This goes beyond setting emission targets; it involves the elimination of outdated technologies and environmentally harmful production processes through legally binding requirements, which may be understood as technology-forcing mandates. In the steel sector, for example, policies require capacity reduction and ultra-low emission retrofitting, compelling firms to undertake technological upgrades alongside compliance with emission standards (Ministry of Industry and Information Technology et al., 2022). Such provisions transform the green transition from policy aspiration into a binding legal obligation, providing a legal basis for supply-side structural reform. Compared with Western approaches that rely primarily on performance standards and allow firms to determine technological pathways, China’s approach more directly addresses technological lock-in and accelerates systemic transformation.

In the process of promoting technological development, the law needs to strike a balance between directional guidance and technological neutrality. Overly locking in specific technology routes may limit or inhibit innovation competition. Therefore, the Ecological and Environmental Code mostly uses expressions such as “encourage” and “support”, reserving some space for enterprises in specific technology choices. However, for strategically important low-carbon technologies lacking sufficient market incentives, the Ecological and Environmental Code provides stronger institutional support. Take Article 1031 as an example, which explicitly encourages the research, development, and application of technologies such as Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage (CCUS). CCUS technologies typically involve large investments, high risks, and long payback periods, so private enterprises lack sufficient incentive for early investment. The “de-risking” framework developed in international development finance literature suggests that public institutional guarantees can reduce the risk-adjusted cost of private capital in nascent sectors (International Energy Agency, 2020). From this perspective, Article 1031’s statutory confirmation of state support responsibilities functions as a public de-risking commitment, helping to shift a portion of early CCUS research and development costs from private firms to public investment, thereby lowering the threshold for private capital entry.

Finally, the Ecological and Environmental Code employs mandatory green procurement to transform the state from a regulator into a market catalyst. Article 949 requires public institutions to prioritize purchasing energy-saving and low-carbon products, a typical demand-side regulatory instrument. Under this mechanism, the government is not only a regulator but also an important market participant. By forming stable demand through public procurement, the state can create early markets for green technologies and send long-term policy signals to enterprises. Government procurement can effectively reduce uncertainty in the commercialization phase of new technologies and attract private capital entry.

Overall, if the provisions in the Ecological and Environmental Code constitute the institutional hardware for synergistic governance of pollution reduction and carbon mitigation, then specific rules of implementation and supporting regulations constitute the software for institutional operation. The two work together to form stable institutional links between the legal system and economic operation. Through the combination of industrial adjustment, technological innovation support, and demand-side policies, the Ecological and Environmental Code not only constrains pollution emissions but also gradually becomes an important institutional tool for promoting industrial upgrading and green transformation.

4 Instrumental Embedding: Repurposing Pollution Control Tools

The preceding analysis examined the structural innovations of the Ecological and Environmental Code. However, it is still necessary to further examine how these institutions function in specific regulatory practice. Unlike establishing a new climate legislative system, China’s codification pathway embeds climate governance requirements within the existing environmental regulatory framework. By expanding the functions of traditional institutional tools, it aims to achieve the dual objectives of pollution control and carbon reduction. Specifically, the Ecological and Environmental Code achieves source control through spatial planning, strengthens process review through EIA, and implements ongoing supervision through emission permits and mandatory standards during project operation. The following sections analyze, from the three stages of source, process, and end-of-pipe, how climate governance is institutionally embedded into the existing environmental regulatory system.

4.1 Source Control: Spatial Planning and Zoning

Regarding how to genuinely constrain high-carbon development, the Ecological and Environmental Code provides a clear response through a triple institutional design. The Ecological and Environmental Code takes spatial planning as an important means of source control, explicitly stipulating mandatory requirements for climate change objectives in territorial spatial planning. Article 61 clearly stipulates that national ecological and environmental protection plans must include objectives and measures for addressing climate change. This provision not only establishes the foundational role of planning in climate governance but also establishes legal consistency mechanisms between plans at different levels. Through codification, climate objectives are incorporated into the planning system with statutory force, thereby reducing potential target conflicts between different departmental plans and forming unified policy guidance at the normative level. In practice, this institutional arrangement has already influenced local industrial distribution. For example, when preparing the Shandong Province Territorial Spatial Plan (2021-2035), Shandong Province adjusted the distribution of coastal petrochemical industries, reducing planned land use for some refining and chemical projects in Dongying, Weifang, and elsewhere. Research in environmental economics suggests that the optimized spatial industrial layout can reduce projected carbon emission increments while sustaining economic growth, a form of “strategic decoupling” that achieves relative separation between economic development trajectories and carbon emission growth through industrial spatial reorganization (Stern, 2006). Spatial planning is thus not only a land use tool but gradually becomes an important institutional means for source control of carbon emissions.

Beyond spatial planning, the Ecological and Environmental Code also elevates the ecological environment zoning system to a statutory system, constructing a grid-based control framework covering the entire country. This system is commonly referred to in practice as the “three lines and one list” (ecological protection redlines, environmental quality baselines, resource utilization upper limit, and ecological environment access list). According to Article 67, each regulatory unit has a clearly defined environmental access list. This system transforms originally abstract emission constraints into specific, operable project access rules, forming a predictable entry threshold in administrative law, enabling enterprises to determine at the investment decision stage whether a project meets environmental requirements (Ministry of Ecology and Environment, 2021b).

Local practices indicate that this system has significantly strengthened the substantive review authority of environmental protection authorities in project approvals. For example, Yanling County in Hunan, as an ecological protection redline area, relying on the “three lines and one list” system, has rejected multiple projects not meeting ecological requirements since implementing ecological zoning control in 2021, refusing to introduce over 20 non-green enterprises in the past three years in total (Zhang, 2024). Shiyan City in Hubei, through the strict implementation of the environmental access list, directly rejected 12 high-energy-consumption, high-emission projects (Shiyan Municipal Bureau of Ecology and Environmen, 2025). These cases demonstrate that the “three lines and one list” can not only curb high-carbon investment at source but also provide solid institutional guarantees for local governments to promote green transformation of industrial structures. This institutional arrangement has, to some extent, changed local governments’ “race to the bottom” behavior in attracting investment, granting ecological and environmental departments more substantive veto power in project approval, thereby strengthening the institutional rigidity of environmental supervision.

Furthermore, under the spatial planning framework established by Article 59, Article 1043 incorporates climate resilience into mandatory spatial constraints. Specifically, when defining urban development boundaries, local governments must, based on scientific climate risk assessment, comprehensively consider long-term climate change impacts such as sea-level rise and extreme weather events. This institutional design is closely related to the precautionary principle in environmental law, which emphasizes taking advanced intervention measures in cases of scientific uncertainty. The Ecological and Environmental Code transforms this principle into operable planning requirements through specific technical standards. In August 2025, the Xiamen Municipal Bureau of Ecology and Environment issued a decision to suspend approval for the “Zhongke Jinyuan Graphite Sagger Production Project”. The reasons included that the project site was located less than 60 meters from nearby villages, the environmental impact report failed to provide a detailed analysis of the impact on sensitive targets, and the scope of the atmospheric impact assessment did not meet the requirements of the technical guidelines. The project was suspended because the environmental impact assessment was inadequate (Xiamen Municipal Bureau of Ecology and Environment, 2025). This decision was made under the pre-Code legal framework, namely the Regulations on the Administration of Construction Project Environmental Protection (adopted 1998, revised 2017). Yet it prefigures the approach later codified by the Ecological and Environmental Code. What was once a discretionary policy consideration, namely climate-related risk, has thus begun to harden into substantive administrative review content. Such standards are gradually evolving into a legal duty of care in administrative approval, requiring local governments to ensure that project plans meet the corresponding requirements during project review. The transition from flexibility to rigidity not only provides institutional leverage for carbon reduction and adaptation but also establishes, in concrete conflicts, the governance logic of “safety takes precedence over development”, deepening climate response from text to practice.

In summary, by embedding climate objectives into spatial planning, the Ecological and Environmental Code effectively promotes source governance, not only providing a legal framework for environmental protection but also ensuring the low-carbon nature and climate resilience of various projects in long-term development, thereby forming a systematic climate governance mechanism throughout territorial space management. The establishment of this mechanism marks China’s systematic response to climate change in the process of environmental codification.

4.2 Process Control: The Expansion of EIA

Beyond spatial planning, how to impose direct climate constraints on specific economic activities is a question that climate governance institutionalization must answer. The Ecological and Environmental Code does not establish new regulatory tools but expands the functions of the existing EIA system to assume the institutional task of carbon reduction governance. In other words, codification does not create new approval mechanisms but embeds the logic of carbon emission governance into the mature EIA system, thereby achieving climate governance objectives within the existing administrative licensing framework. This institutional arrangement can achieve regulatory function expansion at relatively low institutional cost while maintaining regulatory system continuity.

The Ecological and Environmental Code first expands the scope of EIA at the legal level. Article 82 stipulates that the state shall strengthen the EIA of GHG emissions. This provision carries fundamental transformative significance at the normative level: GHGs are legally repositioned from unregulated atmospheric externalities to formally cognizable objects of environmental regulation, a process that comparative law scholars may term normative reclassification. Similar logic appears at the international level. The US Supreme Court in Massachusetts v. EPA held that carbon dioxide qualifies as an “air pollutant” under the Clean Air Act, requiring EPA regulation unless it can prove CO2 is unrelated to global warming. Whether through legislative inclusion (China’s Article 82 of the Ecological and Environmental Code) or judicial interpretation, the functional outcome is convergent: the reclassification of GHGs from an unregulated atmospheric externality to a legally cognizable subject of environmental regulation, a transformation with fundamental consequences for administrative licensing and liability. From an institutional function perspective, this provision also fills regulatory gaps in the existing legal system. In the stage of stand-alone environmental legislation, project EIAs typically focused on traditional pollutants like SO2 and NOx, lacking a systematic review of carbon emissions. After codification, carbon emissions gradually became an important assessment indicator for project access. For example, in construction projects for high-energy-consumption industries such as steel and cement, reports must not only assess pollutant emissions but also include carbon emission forecasts and reduction plans for the entire project lifecycle. This forms an integrated “pollution-carbon” assessment framework, giving climate factors a clear institutional status in project approval.

Beyond the project level, the Ecological and Environmental Code further strengthens the mandatory prior review function of planning EIA. Article 86 stipulates that the formulation of specialized plans for industry, energy, etc., must include EIA incorporating climate considerations. Planning EIA thus not only bears environmental assessment functions but also plays, to some extent, a strategic filtering role. By assessing the overall carbon emission level of a region at the planning stage, regulatory authorities can identify potential high-carbon development pathways before projects enter the approval process, avoiding the long-term lock-in effect of high-carbon infrastructure at source. Research indicates that once high-carbon infrastructure is formed, it affects industrial and energy structures for a long time, producing clear path dependence and forming “carbon lock-in” (Unruh, 2000). Therefore, incorporating climate assessment into planning EIA helps achieve an institutional transformation from ex post remediation to ex ante prevention.

At the project approval stage, China’s EIA system operates as a mandatory administrative licensing act with substantive veto authority. A negative EIA conclusion directly bars project approval, transforming environmental review from a procedural formality into a binding gatekeeping mechanism. This contrasts sharply with the US National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which imposes procedural disclosure obligations on decision-makers without conferring substantive veto authority over project approval. Article 105 of the Ecological and Environmental Code explicitly lists the circumstances for disapproval, which, together with the environmental quality improvement principle established in Article 5, form the institutional basis for this veto authority.

This institutional design means climate performance can be a significant consideration in project approval. For instance, in approving cement or steel projects, even if normal pollutant emissions meet national standards, if the project’s energy efficiency does not reach industry benchmarks or its carbon intensity is too high, the competent authority may still deny approval based on EIA conclusions. This institutional arrangement brings carbon emission constraints directly into the administrative licensing process, making it a rigid policy tool in China’s climate governance, enabling climate objectives to be implemented at the specific project level.

The extension of veto authority to encompass climate performance metrics raises legitimate questions about the scope and accountability of administrative discretion. To guard against arbitrary or expansive executive action, the Ecological and Environmental Code’s EIA framework constrains approval discretion through sector-specific energy efficiency benchmarks, carbon intensity standards, and technical guidelines promulgated by MEE. This combination of statutory veto authority and technical norm-setting enables EIA approval to retain meaningful policy flexibility while remaining scientifically grounded and legally predictable, an arrangement that partially addresses the rule-of-law concerns that expansive administrative discretion would otherwise generate.

Overall, by expanding the evaluation content of the EIA system and strengthening its force of legal codification, it achieves institutional upgrading of climate governance tools within the existing regulatory framework. Thus, climate factors are no longer just macro policy objectives but enter specific administrative decision-making processes through project assessment and planning review. This transformation marks the EIA system evolving from a traditional pollution control tool into an important governance mechanism integrating pollution prevention and carbon reduction objectives.

4.3 End-of-Pipe Regulation: Permitting and Standards

How to translate macro-level climate objectives into daily supervision once industrial facilities enter the operational phase is an important segment in the institutionalization of climate governance. The Ecological and Environmental Code does not establish a new regulatory system but systematically restructures the two fundamental institutions of emission permits and mandatory standards, incorporating carbon reduction objectives into the existing end-of-pipe regulatory framework. This institutional arrangement exhibits path continuity, gradually embedding climate governance requirements within the existing environmental regulatory system.

The Ecological and Environmental Code, by strengthening the pollutant discharge permit system, establishes its foundational position in the comprehensive supervision of stationary sources. Article 174 explicitly establishes the emission permit as the core tool for stationary source supervision, legally establishing a “one-certificate management” institutional framework aimed at resolving the long-standing information asymmetry problem regarding enterprise emission data. Through the pollutant discharge permit system, enterprises need to continuously report and update emission data on a unified platform, enabling regulatory authorities to conduct dynamic reviews. The Ecological and Environmental Code, by integrating pollutant emission data and carbon emission reporting mechanisms, gradually establishes a unified data verification system. While monitoring and recording conventional pollutants under Article 183, enterprises must also report carbon emission data according to Part Four provisions. For thermal power enterprises, their SO2 concentrations and CO2 emissions will be verified through the same information platform. This mechanism forms a “single-point verification” model, which not only reduces enterprises’ compliance costs for duplicate reporting but also enhances the auditability and transparency of administrative supervision.

Secondly, the Ecological and Environmental Code establishes the principle of synergistic control, formally embedding climate governance into the traditional pollution regulatory system. Article 189 stipulates the implementation of synergistic control over atmospheric pollutants such as particulate matter and GHGs, normatively responding to the co-benefits proposition in international environmental governance, achieving both pollution reduction and GHG emission reduction through unified governance measures. Through explicit statutory provisions, Article 189 elevates synergistic pollution-and-carbon governance from a matter of administrative discretion to a legally binding procedural obligation, and simultaneously extends the legal competence of existing air pollution enforcement officials to verify GHG emissions, without requiring the establishment of a new parallel inspection bureaucracy. In the past, atmospheric pollution enforcement and GHG supervision belonged to two institutionally distinct systems with institutional segmentation. The Ecological and Environmental Code, through legal authorization, grants traditional air pollution enforcement personnel the legal competence to simultaneously verify GHG emissions, achieving the embedding of climate enforcement functions within the regulatory network without establishing new institutions. This integration pathway helps improve enforcement resource utilization efficiency, solving the long-standing problem of enforcement disconnect where pollution is managed but carbon is not, and reducing redundant construction between regulatory systems.

However, managing emissions only touches the surface. To fundamentally solve the problem, constraints must be applied to the source of “efficiency”. The Ecological and Environmental Code, by expanding the mandatory standards system, promotes a transformation in regulatory logic. Traditional environmental law mainly relied on emission concentration limits for end-of-pipe control, while Articles 70 and 948 of the Ecological and Environmental Code introduce a mandatory standards system encompassing green and low-carbon requirements. This institutional change reflects a shift from a concentration-based regulatory model to a performance-based regulatory model. Unlike merely limiting emission concentrations, performance-based standards directly target energy efficiency or carbon intensity, shifting regulatory focus from “how much is emitted” to “how efficiently it is produced”.

This approach has structural affinity with the Best Available Techniques (BAT) standard in EU industrial emissions regulation⁸, which requires enterprises to adopt the most advanced economically and technically feasible production methods to simultaneously reduce pollution and improve energy efficiency. The Ecological and Environmental Code, by incorporating energy efficiency standards into the mandatory national standards system, effectively transforms industry best practices into legally binding compliance thresholds. For example, mandatory standards such as the Norm of Energy Consumption per Unit Product of Cement (State Administration for Market Regulation & Standardization Administration, 2021) will force enterprises to improve energy efficiency through process updates, waste heat recovery, etc., or face legal risks. The Chinese model, however, diverges from BAT in one analytically significant respect: whereas EU BAT maintains technology neutrality, allowing firms to choose their own pathways to the performance threshold, China’s mandatory energy efficiency benchmarks are sector-specific and prescriptive, directly guiding technology choice at the expense of firm-level autonomy. This accelerates structural decarbonization but narrows the space for bottom-up technological innovation.

From an institutional function perspective, this expansion of the standards system marks the extension of environmental law’s regulatory object from traditional pollution discharge behavior to the core domain of enterprise production technology. By setting legally binding energy efficiency and technology access thresholds, the law not only constrains emission behavior but also, to some extent, influences enterprises’ technology choices and industrial structures. For enterprises long reliant on high-energy-consumption production methods, this technology-forcing mechanism will compel them to phase out inefficient capacity and transition to more efficient production methods. Therefore, end-of-pipe regulation is no longer limited to emission control but promotes industrial upgrading through technology and efficiency standards.

Overall, the Ecological and Environmental Code systematically integrates the three major institutions of emission permits, synergistic control, and performance-based standards within the existing regulatory framework, establishing a more complete end-of-pipe governance system. The pollutant discharge permit system solves the problem of emission information acquisition, synergistic control achieves enforcement integration of pollution control and climate governance, and mandatory standards promote industrial efficiency improvement through technical requirements. The three interconnect, jointly constituting the legal support for climate governance in the operational phase, marking an institutional transformation of environmental regulation from end-of-pipe control towards equal emphasis on source regulation and process constraints.

4.4 Comparative Perspective: The Institutional Divergence of Chinese and Western Climate Governance Models

Through the preceding institutional analysis of source, process, and end-of-pipe stages, it is clear how the Ecological and Environmental Code embeds climate governance objectives into existing regulatory tools. Placing this institutional structure under a comparative law perspective reveals obvious differences between the governance model of the Ecological and Environmental Code and climate governance pathways in European and American countries. Western countries typically take market mechanisms and performance regulation as core tools. For example, the EU mainly relies on the EU ETS to form an emission reduction incentive mechanism centered on carbon prices, while US climate policy relies more on regulatory agencies setting emission performance standards and using market competition to prompt enterprises to choose the lowest-cost emission reduction technology pathways. In this model, the state usually maintains technological neutrality, avoiding direct intervention in specific technology routes, instead guiding enterprises to autonomously adjust their production methods through emission caps or performance targets.

In contrast, the institutional structure embodied in the Ecological and Environmental Code tends more towards a hybrid governance model combining administrative dominance and market mechanisms. Under this model, planning control, emission permits, industrial policy, and the carbon market are not independent of each other but are collectively integrated within the state-led ecological civilization governance framework. Scholars have characterized this governance model as exhibiting features of developmental environmentalism (Zhu, 2022), where the state actively guides industrial upgrading and technological transformation through institutionalized regulatory instruments, simultaneously advancing environmental objectives and economic development priorities rather than treating them as competing goals.

This institutional divergence represents choices made by different economies under their respective governance traditions and industrial structures. The market-oriented model can effectively enhance resource allocation efficiency in mature market systems, but in areas with obvious technology path dependence and high industrial adjustment costs, its transformation speed may be constrained by existing industrial structures. Comparatively, clarifying industrial upgrading and technology transformation directions through legal forms helps, to some extent, break the high-carbon technology lock-in effect and accelerate structural transformation processes. Therefore, the institutional logic embodied in the Ecological and Environmental Code is not a simple replication of Western climate governance tools but an integration of market mechanisms, industrial policy, and regulatory tools within an administrative dominance framework, forming a climate governance legal system with Chinese characteristics.

5 Governance Characteristics: The Chinese Approach

The previous chapter analyzes how core regulatory tools in the Ecological and Environmental Code, spatial planning, EIA, and emission permits, are expanded and embedded with carbon reduction missions. These tools are rooted in China’s unique model of administrative dominance, rigidifying legal obligations and embedding political incentives. This section will therefore explore the three major operational mechanisms under this logic. How the target responsibility system drives local action, how central environmental protection inspections ensure policy implementation, and how the liability system constructed by the Ecological and Environmental Code, centered on administrative means, jointly build a powerful enforcement framework for “synergistic enhancement of pollution reduction and carbon mitigation”.

5.1 Political Accountability: Target Responsibility System

The uniqueness of China’s climate governance lies not only in the design of market mechanisms but also in its embedded political accountability system. Unlike Western environmental law, which often relies on external judicial review, China internalizes pressure, promoting policy implementation through performance assessment and accountability mechanisms within the administrative system. The Ecological and Environmental Code constructs a “target responsibility system”, institutionalizing the government’s environmental governance responsibilities and forming a top-down enforcement mechanism. As Alex Wang has argued, China’s environmental legal system derives much of its implementation force from integration with the political incentive structure; law functions not merely as an abstract normative framework but as an instrument of political accountability, directly linked to cadre performance evaluation and career advancement prospects (Wang, 2013).

Article 27 of the Ecological and Environmental Code explicitly stipulates that local governments must achieve ecological and environmental protection targets and accept assessment and evaluation. The core significance of this provision lies in incorporating environmental policy objectives into the statutory responsibility system, making ecological and environmental indicators legally binding government governance tasks. When the “dual carbon” goals are incorporated into the government responsibility framework, indicators such as carbon intensity reduction become governance tasks that local governments must complete. When localities fail to achieve relevant emission reduction targets, they are deemed to violate the Ecological and Environmental Code, triggering administrative accountability mechanisms, forming a parallel constraint structure of legal and political responsibility. Incorporating environmental indicators into government performance assessment significantly enhances local governments’ enthusiasm for implementing environmental policies.

Furthermore, the Ecological and Environmental Code, by directly linking target completion to the performance evaluation of local officials, further promotes the implementation of the target responsibility system. In China’s management system for officials, local officials’ promotion is usually closely related to their governance performance. With the institutionalization of the ecological civilization concept, environmental governance indicators have gradually been incorporated into assessment systems for officials, thereby changing local governments’ incentive structures and directly linking carbon reduction performance to officials’ political prospects (Kostka & Mol, 2013). Empirical research confirms that when environmental indicators are incorporated into cadre performance evaluation systems, local governments significantly increase investment in pollution control and emission reduction implementation, exhibiting more proactive compliance behavior (Ran, 2013).

At the same time, the Ecological and Environmental Code strengthens the liability structure of environmental governance through the “party and government accountability” principle. Article 4 emphasizes the leadership role of the Communist Party of China in ecological civilization construction, while Article 18, through responsibility lists, clarifies the duties of government departments in ecological and environmental governance. This institutional arrangement means environmental governance is not only a statutory obligation of administrative organs but is also incorporated into the Party’s governance system, thereby forming a coordinated Party-government, dual-layer parallel responsibility structure. In practice, party and government accountability, through institutional tools such as intra-Party supervision, administrative accountability, and performance assessment, promotes the effective transmission and implementation of environmental policies across different levels of government. This institutional arrangement has also sparked ongoing academic discussions about the relationship between political leadership and legal governance. On one hand, Party leadership provides a strong political mobilization capacity for environmental policies, enabling the state to rapidly coordinate administrative resources when addressing complex environmental problems, enhancing policy implementation efficiency. On the other hand, some scholars point out that under circumstances where the Party-government system deeply participates in environmental governance, it is necessary to further clarify the relationship between administrative decisions and legal procedures to ensure that policy implementation remains both efficient and institutionally anchored within the framework of the rule of law, a tension that Chinese environmental governance scholarship is beginning to address directly.

Overall, through institutional arrangements such as the target responsibility system, cadre performance assessment, and “party and government accountability”, the Ecological and Environmental Code constructs an enforcement mechanism centered on political accountability, enabling climate governance objectives to be implemented level by level through the administrative system.

5.2 Enforcement Mechanism: Central Inspection

To bridge the potential implementation gap between statutory targets and local implementation, the Ecological and Environmental Code legalizes the distinctively Chinese central ecological and environmental protection inspection, achieving the transformation of this institution from policy to norm. This legalization marks the construction of stable cross-level supervision within the administrative system in China’s environmental governance. In contrast to many Western countries, where environmental compliance is primarily driven by judicial review, China has formed an enforcement mechanism centered on internal supervision within the administrative system. Through the hierarchical system, environmental targets are decomposed and consolidated level by level, directly promoting the implementation of environmental policies (Wang, 2013).

Article 28 of the Ecological and Environmental Code explicitly provides for the legalization of the central environmental protection inspection system, granting the central government power to directly intervene in local ecological and environmental governance, transforming central environmental protection inspections from a political tool into a statutory state responsibility. This provision means that when inspection teams are stationed locally, their identity is not only as inspection groups dispatched by higher-level administrative organs but also as statutory bodies exercising supervisory duties according to law. Through this institutionalized pathway, central inspections gradually evolve from periodic political campaigns into hierarchical supervision mechanisms with stable procedures. China’s central environmental protection inspections exhibit dual characteristics in practice: elements of routine administrative governance alongside campaign-style political mobilization. Through the coordinated operation of these two mechanisms, central inspections significantly enhance short-term local environmental governance effectiveness, though questions about long-term institutionalization and procedural predictability remain.

With the expansion of inspection content under Article 28, the focus of central inspections has also extended from traditional pollution control to the implementation of the “dual carbon” goals. Inspection content now includes checks on carbon emission control, energy structure adjustment, and management of “two high” (high energy consumption, high emission) projects (The Communist Party of China Central Committee & State Council, 2025). In practice, local governments, sometimes driven by economic growth pressures, may regulate high-energy, high-emission projects relatively loosely, while central inspections, through cross-regional supervision mechanisms, form legal intervention against such behavior (The Communist Party of China Central Committee & State Council, 2025). It transforms national-level emission reduction targets into rigid supervision over locally specific actions, thereby directly constraining local choices between economic growth and environmental protection, ensuring emission reduction tasks are implemented.

Furthermore, Article 29 provides a strong legal basis for central environmental protection inspection feedback. This provision stipulates that when inspection teams discover local governments failing to fulfill environmental protection responsibilities, they shall require local governments to formulate rectification plans and undergo rectification review within the prescribed time. Through this mechanism, inspection feedback has gradually transformed from policy recommendations into rectification requirements with clear administrative force, endowing it with a quasi-judicial nature. In specific practice, inspection teams typically issue feedback letters to local governments listing existing problems, rectification requirements, and completion deadlines. Local governments must then formulate rectification plans accordingly and submit them for review by the specified date. This process transforms past “flexible suggestions” into “compulsory tasks” that must be executed, ensuring local governments’ proactive action in implementing climate policies. Through this quasi-judicial mechanism, central inspections can directly intervene in local governance to correct protectionist deviations, providing a degree of accountability and implementation predictability that judicial review mechanisms have proved difficult to supply in China’s current legal system. Whether this model can sustain its effectiveness as it becomes routinized, however, remains an empirical question that warrants longitudinal research.

Thus, with the expansion of inspection content under Article 28 and the strengthening of feedback mechanisms under Article 29, central ecological and environmental protection inspections have gradually formed an operational logic combining hierarchical supervision and political mobilization in practice. On the one hand, through codification and proceduralization arrangements, the inspection system gradually becomes a regularized administrative supervision mechanism. On the other hand, its cross-level political mobilization capacity can concentrate administrative resources in a short time, promoting local implementation of national climate governance objectives. This dual-characteristic institutional design ensures the central government’s supervisory rigidity and implementation effectiveness over localities, providing stable and predictable institutional guarantees for implementing the “dual carbon” goals.

In summary, the legalization of the central environmental protection inspection system, along with the expansion of inspection scope and rectification mechanisms, enables central emission reduction targets to be effectively transformed into local action responsibilities, thereby institutionally guaranteeing the implementation of climate governance policies.

5.3 Legal Liability: Administrative Dominance

In addressing environmental violations, the Ecological and Environmental Code exhibits distinct characteristics of administrative dominance. Unlike many Western countries, which mainly rely on judicial liability and litigation mechanisms, China’s environmental governance emphasizes achieving compliance through administrative supervision and administrative penalties. In Part Five of the Ecological and Environmental Code, “Legal Liability,” there are significant differences in the severity of penalties for pollution control violations and carbon emission violations, reflecting the unique design of China’s climate governance pathway, pollution behaviors are usually regarded as illegal acts with direct environmental harm, thus subject to relatively severe punitive measures, while carbon emissions issues are more often defined as externalities arising from the development process, requiring governance through quota management and administrative regulation.

First, in the field of traditional pollution control, the Ecological and Environmental Code continues a relatively strict penalty model. For example, Article 1179 stipulates that for acts such as illegal dumping of hazardous waste, violators may face administrative detention, while the daily accrual penalty provided in Article 1060 also demonstrates strict accountability methods in pollution control. Such institutional designs reflect the punitive regulatory characteristics of China’s pollution control, forming mandatory deterrence against enterprises through high fines and continuous penalties. In contrast, the liability mechanism for carbon emission violations exhibits more managerial characteristics. According to Article 1226, enterprises failing to surrender sufficient carbon quotas on time shall face heavy fines of 5 to 10 times the market price and may be ordered to suspend production. This liability mechanism is punitive rather than restorative, aiming to ensure compliance through strict administrative penalties. This institutional design makes China’s carbon emission governance heavily dependent on the administrative organs’ capacity for allocating and managing emission rights, rather than achieving regulatory objectives through criminal liability or high-intensity punishment.

These institutional differences reflect a deeper divergence between China’s climate governance model and Western liability paradigms. In the United States, environmental compliance is reinforced through criminal liability, civil enforcement and citizen suit provisions under statutes such as the Clean Air Act, a model that relies on adversarial judicial accountability. In the EU, ETS compliance penalties are calibrated to market price signals, embedding accountability within market mechanisms. China’s model, by contrast, emphasizes continuous administrative management of quota allocation and emission behavior, which scholars have characterized as “managerial environmental governance” (Xie & Faure, in press). This comparative framing clarifies that the Ecological and Environmental Code’s administrative liability design is not an institutional gap but a deliberate structural choice reflecting the logic of administrative dominance.

Overall, the Ecological and Environmental Code, by distinguishing liability mechanisms for pollution violations and carbon emission violations, constructs a liability system centered on administrative supervision. It implements strict penalties for pollution behaviors while adopting a combination of quota management and economic regulation for carbon emissions issues, reflecting the administrative dominance model in China’s climate governance. From a comparative law perspective, this model forms a clear contrast with the Western environmental liability system centered on judicial liability and also provides important clues for understanding China’s institutional pathway for climate governance.

6 Challenges and Critical Assessment

While the Ecological and Environmental Code’s institutional architecture, anchored in the target responsibility system, central ecological and environmental protection inspection, and administrative dominance, constructs a powerful enforcement framework for synergistic governance, this model is not without inherent tensions. Its reliance on political incentives and administrative mobilization generates three categories of structural limitation that warrant critical examination: the operational ambiguity of synergy in practice; the fragility of the data infrastructure on which synergy governance depends; and the bounded capacity of administrative approaches in the absence of judicial checks.

6.1 The Ambiguity of “Synergy” in Practice

The Ecological and Environmental Code explicitly establishes the basic principle of “synergistic enhancement of pollution reduction and carbon mitigation” at the institutional level. However, this objective faces significant operational uncertainty in specific practice. This uncertainty stems not only from operational difficulties but from a more fundamental institutional gap: the Ecological and Environmental Code does not establish an explicit priority ordering among competing environmental interests. When conflicts arise, as they inevitably do in practice, between pollution control, carbon reduction targets, and economic development pressures, the absence of a clear value hierarchy weakens the practical binding force of the synergy principle and leaves administrative discretion to fill the gap. Similar issues are widely discussed in international environmental governance. When multiple environmental objectives coexist, the lack of clear priorities in law often leads to target drift in regulatory practice (Oseland & Haarstad, 2022).

First, the Ecological and Environmental Code has not resolved the technical trade-off between end-of-pipe pollution control and energy conservation. In several high-energy-consumption industries, mainstream pollution reduction technology pathways may themselves conflict with carbon reduction goals. Take the steel industry as an example. To meet strict air pollutant emission standards, deep treatment facilities such as blast furnace gas fine desulfurization are widely applied. While efficiently removing hydrogen sulfide, these facilities consume substantial energy during operation, leading to additional increases in process energy consumption and associated carbon emissions. In the engineering and environmental policy literature, this phenomenon is termed the “energy penalty”, a well-documented structural trade-off inherent in deep end-of-pipe treatment technologies. Research indicates that some deep treatment processes may increase energy consumption in relevant production links by approximately 5% to 15% (Ma et al., 2022), thus forming a conflicting coupling between pollution reduction and carbon reduction targets. In this context, while end-of-pipe treatment can significantly reduce pollutant emissions, it may indirectly increase carbon emissions through higher energy consumption, creating a dilemma of “end-of-pipe treatment exacerbating upstream emissions”. Similar situations are particularly evident in key regions. For example, in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, to achieve autumn and winter air quality improvement targets, some steel enterprises implementing ultra-low emission transformations saw their supporting environmental protection facilities’ simultaneous operation increase comprehensive energy consumption, indirectly raising regional carbon intensity. In local governance practice, due to air quality indicators having clear assessment cycles and quantitative standards, local governments often prioritize ensuring pollutant emissions meet standards, thereby dismantling the institutional objective of synergistic control in practice into single objective prioritization. This phenomenon constitutes what regulatory scholars term “regulatory displacement” (Oseland & Haarstad, 2022): the substitution of readily measurable short-term indicators (pollutant concentration limits) for harder-to-quantify long-term objectives (cumulative carbon reduction), driven by the performance assessment incentives the target responsibility system creates.

Second, this technological contradiction is even more pronounced at the regional level, interwoven with different regions’ development conditions. The Ecological and Environmental Code, relying on the target responsibility system and the dual control system for carbon emissions, implements relatively uniform carbon constraint indicators nationwide. However, this indicator system, in practice, does not fully consider differences in economic structures and development stages among regions. Although Article 1042 of the Ecological and Environmental Code proposes “carrying out regional climate change adaptation actions according to different regional characteristics”, against the backdrop of uneven development between eastern and western regions, this provision still faces significant challenges at the implementation level.

Take energy-exporting provinces such as Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, and Shanxi as examples. These regions are responsible for important functions of national coal and electricity supply, with their thermal power installed capacity largely serving the energy needs of eastern and central regions, but carbon emissions are mainly counted in the production location statistical system. Such accounting methods conventions subject energy-exporting regions to disproportionate emission reduction obligations, raising a dimension of environmental justice that transcends efficiency concerns: the equitable allocation of carbon accountability across regions at different stages of economic development. This is a domestic analog of the “common but differentiated responsibilities” principle in Article 3 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change⁹, raising the question of whether differentiated domestic carbon accountability rules may be normatively required as well as economically efficient. Responsibility allocation in climate governance has long been an important topic in international environmental law. For example, the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities” in international environmental law embodies the concept of responsibility sharing among different subjects. At the domestic level, although Article 113 of the Ecological and Environmental Code proposes the principle of ecological compensation, the relevant institutions remain at the level of general principles, lacking clear responsibility allocation rules and justiciability mechanisms, resulting in a lack of stable support for synergy goals in terms of regional equity.

A more subtle but far-reaching ambiguity arises from the asymmetry in binding force between mitigation and adaptation measures. Under current governance logic, indicators such as carbon intensity and total energy consumption have clear quantitative standards, thus becoming core content of annual assessments and constituting rigid constraints with coercive force. In contrast, climate adaptation measures such as urban drainage system renovation, flood control infrastructure construction, and agricultural planting structure adjustment, while critical for responding to extreme climate risks, are difficult to quantify in performance in the short term due to their obvious public goods attributes and non-excludability characteristics, and are therefore often postponed in local decision-making.

Following the catastrophic 2021 Henan rainstorm event, investigation reports from municipal authorities indicated that in a sample of sponge city construction projects, a substantial proportion of dedicated funds had been directed toward visible landscaping elements rather than essential underground rainwater infrastructure (Audit Office of Henan Province, 2023), a pattern consistent with the symbolic implementation literature (Ran, 2013). This fund allocation reflects a typical behavioral model of symbolic implementation, responding to policy requirements through short-term visible engineering achievements while underinvesting in infrastructure that truly affects urban safety resilience. Thus, the marginalization of adaptation measures is not an accidental mistake at the implementation level but a structural consequence of asymmetric institutional binding force under performance orientation.

Overall, the ambiguity of synergy in practice is not a single institutional defect but a systemic problem formed by the superposition of multiple factors, including technology pathways, regional structures, and assessment mechanisms. This indicates that merely stipulating the objectives of pollution reduction and carbon reduction in parallel within legal texts is insufficient to achieve genuine synergistic governance. To endow the synergy principle with stable institutional effectiveness in practice, future institutional design still needs to further clarify the hierarchy of values among different environmental interests and establish rules of discretion for conflict situations. Additionally, it is necessary to improve the cross-regional carbon responsibility allocation mechanism and to structurally optimize the existing performance evaluation system, enabling it to balance short-term emission reduction outcomes with long-term security goals.

6.2 Data Integrity and Technical Capacity

With the implementation of the Ecological and Environmental Code, the authenticity and accuracy of carbon emission data have become critical conditions for the effective operation of synergistic pollution and carbon reduction governance. Article 1035 of the Ecological and Environmental Code explicitly establishes a national carbon emission statistical accounting system, emphasizing the foundational role of data quality in achieving emission reduction targets. However, in practice, the construction of the Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) system still faces multiple challenges, particularly in ensuring data integrity and preventing data fraud.

First, carbon emission monitoring has institutional characteristics different from traditional pollutant monitoring in terms of technical pathways. For conventional pollutants such as SO₂ and NOₓ, regulatory authorities can conduct real-time measurement through Continuous Emission Monitoring Systems (CEMS). Carbon emission accounting, by contrast, relies primarily on activity-based data, fuel consumption quantities multiplied by sector-specific emission factors, a methodology that depends on the accuracy and completeness of energy statistics rather than direct measurement, introducing a qualitatively different verification challenge. This means regulatory authorities need not only environmental monitoring capacity but also relatively high-level energy statistics and accounting capacity. In practice, however, some grassroots ecological and environmental departments still face technical capacity deficiencies in energy statistics and carbon accounting, manifesting as shortages of professional personnel, insufficient data collection equipment, and an inconsistent understanding of accounting standards. Research indicates that in some coal-fired power enterprises, carbon emission accounting still relies on empirical estimation, increasing the risk of information deviation in policy implementation. Without stable technical support and audit mechanisms, accounting errors may gradually accumulate, affecting the actual evaluation results of emission reduction policies (Yan et al., 2023).

Second, carbon data governance also faces incentive distortions caused by performance assessment mechanisms. The effective operation of the carbon verification system requires the joint efforts of local governments, emitting enterprises, and third-party institutions. While the target responsibility system established in Article 27 strengthens local governments’ motivation to implement emission reduction targets, directly linking carbon performance with political performance assessment may also generate potential negative incentives. Goodhart’s Law (Goodhart, 1984) captures this systemic risk precisely: when a measure becomes the primary target of assessment, it loses its value as an indicator. Applied to China’s carbon governance, this implies that carbon intensity targets, precisely because they are high-stakes performance indicators, create systematic incentives for data manipulation, conservative reporting, or “compliance theatre” rather than genuine emission reduction.

In domestic research, this incentive distortion is concretized as collusive behavior in the verification link. Under conditions of regulatory lag and information asymmetry, emitting enterprises and verification agencies may form strategic cooperation, affecting the authenticity of verification results. International research has also raised concerns about data quality issues in China’s carbon market. In the first compliance period of the national carbon market, some enterprises had issues with carbon emission data reporting errors and statistical inconsistencies, indicating that data quality challenges have manifested at the quantitative level and may weaken the effectiveness of carbon price signals. Therefore, how to establish a stable institutional balance between performance assessment and data authenticity has become an important issue in carbon governance institutional design.

Finally, the integrity of the MRV system is also affected by the institutional structure of third-party verification mechanisms. Although Article 79 requires monitoring institutions to register and assume legal responsibility for data authenticity, the current market-oriented verification model, in which verification agencies are contracted and paid directly by the enterprises they audit, generates structural conflicts of interest that compromise verification independence. This is a well-recognized problem in regulated industries: the “client capture” dynamic that contributed to audit failures in financial markets has a direct analog in carbon market verification (Ministry of Ecology and Environment, 2022). In practice, if verification agencies form long-term cooperative relationships with emitting enterprises, the verification process may become perfunctory or even involve collusion, weakening the overall credibility of the MRV system. Therefore, it is recommended to strengthen verification independence through mechanisms such as government unified payment, random inspection systems, or national audit mechanisms to enhance the transparency and credibility of carbon emission data.

Overall, the Ecological and Environmental Code provides an important legal framework for carbon emission monitoring and accounting. However, in the specific implementation process, it still faces multiple challenges, including insufficient technical capacity, data distortion risks induced by performance assessment, and insufficient independence of third-party verification. Only on the basis of continuously improving technical support capacity, optimizing assessment mechanisms, and improving the MRV institutional structure can the authenticity of carbon emission data be genuinely guaranteed, thereby providing reliable information foundations for synergistic pollution and carbon reduction governance.

6.3 Limits of the Administrative Approach

Although the administrative-led model possesses strong policy mobilization capacity, its inherent limitations cannot be overlooked (David, 1985). The primary issue lies in the potential for rigid assessment mechanisms to induce implementation distortions. China’s climate governance relies on a high-pressure transmission mechanism formed by the target responsibility system and central ecological and environmental protection inspection, compelling local governments to intensively achieve emission reduction targets within specific timeframes. While this enhances implementation efficiency, it also tends to trigger campaign-style governance (Xu & Ma, 2025). When local governments face short-term energy consumption or carbon intensity assessment pressures, policy implementation may devolve into temporary, concentrated administrative actions. The power rationing episode in Heilongjiang and other provinces in 2021 illustrates this dynamic. Facing imminent energy intensity assessment deadlines, local governments escalated from “orderly power usage” protocols to direct industrial power cuts, causing significant disruption to manufacturing operations and supply chains. This episode illustrates how the target responsibility system can generate implementation behavior that achieves indicator compliance while producing substantial economic externalities. While such measures reduced energy consumption data in the short term, they caused significant disruptions to industrial production and market order. Relevant research indicates that such administrative measures reflect the implementation deviations that can arise from the target responsibility system during pressure transmission, namely, local governments, in order to meet short-term assessment indicators, resort to policy instruments that entail lower immediate costs but higher social costs. Although the current Ecological and Environmental Code grants broad powers to administrative agencies, it has not yet established corresponding procedural constraints, allowing governance actions to potentially deviate from the rule of law and normal economic practices, thereby weakening, to a certain extent, the policy stability and predictability of climate governance.

The rigidity of implementation methods also highlights the relative absence of judicial checks and balances in climate governance. Article 32 of the Ecological and Environmental Code addresses environmental public interest litigation in principled terms, but its effective scope remains concentrated on pollution prevention and ecological damage claims. Carbon-related cases proceed primarily through collateral litigation pathways, for instance, attaching GHG considerations to conventional pollution or ecological damage claims, and no standalone climate change public interest litigation framework has yet been established. In recent years, some climate change-related public interest litigation attempts have emerged in China, such as cases involving GHG emissions like the “wind and solar power curtailment cases”, but overall, carbon-related cases still mainly proceed through collateral litigation pathways, with no strict climate change public interest litigation having yet formed. Judicial relief in China’s environmental field exhibits characteristics of “de-substantiation”, and the extraterritorial “rights-based” pathway for climate change response is not suitable for China’s national conditions. Overall, climate litigation remains in an exploratory stage, facing practical difficulties such as questionable justiciability and difficulty proving causation, with no stable judicial review pathway yet formed.

In contrast, international climate litigation has shown clear judicial activism trends. The landmark Urgenda decision¹⁰ illustrates the alternative judicial pathway: by invoking the European Convention on Human Rights, the Dutch Supreme Court defined climate inaction as a human rights violation and required the government to raise its national emission reduction targets, establishing a judicially enforceable “duty of care” in climate governance. This case exemplifies the constitutionalist pathway that the EU model has pursued and that China’s administrative model has institutionally bypassed. This case further demonstrates the function of judicial power in checking and balancing administrative power (Fischer-Lescano & Teubner, 2004). In contrast, China concentrates climate decision-making power within the administrative system. While this facilitates unified policy implementation, it also means that when disputes over quota allocation arise, or local governments adopt short-term measures, there is a lack of mature judicial review mechanisms to rectify such deviations.

Furthermore, the superimposition of administrative regulations has, to some extent, added enterprises’ compliance burdens. Building on the existing pollution prevention system, the Ecological and Environmental Code superimposes complete carbon MRV obligations. For resource-rich large enterprises, they can still cope with the complexity and high costs of this dual compliance. However, for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), due to technical and managerial capacity limitations, it is difficult to cope with increasingly strict environmental regulations, leading to significantly increased environmental management costs. Survey evidence suggests that SMEs consistently face a “triple deficit” in climate compliance — insufficient capital, inadequate technical expertise, and weak managerial incentives (Du, 2025). ESG disclosure rates among smaller listed companies (exemplified by the Huazheng Small Cap Index) stand at approximately 38.8%, compared with over 90% for large enterprises, a compliance gap that reflects structural capacity differences rather than regulatory evasion. However, the Ecological and Environmental Code has not yet established differentiated or transitional compliance mechanisms for SMEs, and this relatively uniform regulatory design may unintentionally raise market entry barriers, thereby affecting the diversity and innovation vitality of economic actors.

In the future implementation of the Ecological and Environmental Code, it remains necessary to further improve institutional constraints on administrative power. On one hand, procedural rules should be clarified to limit the application of extreme administrative measures, including setting starting conditions, implementation periods, and information disclosure obligations for energy or carbon emission emergency controls, to enhance policy predictability and credibility. On the other hand, the scope of judicial review in climate governance could be appropriately expanded, for example, by introducing limited judicial oversight in areas such as carbon quota allocation and policy implementation, fostering constructive interaction between judicial review and administrative discretion. Embedding these procedural safeguard mechanisms helps reduce the institutional risks brought by campaign-style governance while maintaining administrative mobilization capacity. Overall, the administrative dominance model demonstrates significant efficiency advantages in China’s climate governance, but its long-term stable operation still depends on the synergistic support of institutionalized supervision and rule of law constraints. Only by forming an effective balance between administrative efficiency and rule of law guarantees can the climate governance system continuously enhance its stability and legitimacy while maintaining implementation capacity.

7 Conclusion

The preceding analysis has revealed both the institutional achievements and the structural limitations of China’s codified approach to climate governance. This concluding section synthesizes the article’s theoretical contribution, examines the global implications of the Chinese model for comparative climate law scholarship, and identifies the most pressing directions for future empirical and comparative research. The discussion will proceed in three parts. First, it will examine and elucidate, at the theoretical level, the unique governance logic and institutional core of the Chinese Approach. Second, it will expand to a global perspective to explore the differentiated problem-solving approaches that this path may offer for international climate governance. Finally, it will return to the implementation process of the Ecological and Environmental Code itself, identifying key issues worthy of focused observation and research in the future.

7.1 Theoretical Synthesis

The legislative practice of the Ecological and Environmental Code clearly delineates a pathway for legalizing climate governance with Chinese characteristics. The defining feature of China’s codification pathway is the adoption of an “embedded” rather than “reconstructive” legislative logic, a distinction this article has developed to characterize the difference between systematically transforming existing regulatory tools to carry climate governance functions and constructing a new, freestanding climate legal order. The embedded logic is pragmatic and path-dependent: it leverages existing institutional capacities, enforcement routines, and administrative relationships rather than building de novo institutional infrastructure. The Ecological and Environmental Code does not establish an independent legal system for climate change, but, through systematically transforming existing mature regulatory tools, pollution control, spatial planning, EIA, emission permits, etc., it embeds carbon reduction targets within them, achieving deep integration of pollution reduction and carbon mitigation at the institutional level. This also reflects a pragmatic orientation, prioritizing administrative efficacy, relying on existing systems to strengthen implementation, and ultimately serving the realization of national strategic objectives. This model also profoundly reflects the function and positioning of law within the framework of authoritarian environmentalism. The Ecological and Environmental Code functions as a political-legal transmission mechanism, converting national emission reduction commitments, embodied in the “dual carbon” targets, into binding statutory obligations and administrative performance indicators. This conversion does not merely reflect existing political will; it constitutively shapes governance behavior by constraining discretion, clarifying obligations, and creating accountability pathways through the legal system. Its effectiveness derives not only from the legal provisions themselves, but also from enforcement mechanisms such as the target responsibility system and central inspections, which rigidly bind political accountability with legal obligations. As a result, China’s climate governance presents a climate governance paradigm characterized by a high degree of administrative leadership and strong implementation capacity.

Through this codification process, “synergy” has undergone a normative transition: from a macro policy aspiration to a legal principle with substantive binding force. It is no longer merely a governance slogan but a benchmark for institutional design, a standard for assessing administrative compliance, and a constraint on corporate conduct, providing China’s multi-objective green transformation with the statutory foundation that policy documents alone could not supply. This transition from soft policy to hard law represents the article’s central analytical claim.

7.2 Global Implications

The governance pathway presented by the Ecological and Environmental Code clearly transcends domestic institutional reform itself and begins to occupy an important position in institutional discussions of global climate governance. It not only provides new institutional references for developing countries but also, to some extent, poses an institutional challenge to the predominantly Euro-American climate constitutionalism pathway. In comparative climate governance scholarship, the EU model has been characterized as a “climate constitutionalism” pathway (Eckes, 2025): it combines fundamental rights-based climate litigation, market-based carbon pricing through the EU ETS, and judicially enforced governmental accountability. This paradigm has acquired quasi-normative authority in international climate policy discourse, implicitly positioning constitutionalist and market-led models as the institutional benchmark against which other governance approaches are evaluated. This model has been particularly evident in the wave of climate litigation in recent years, such as court rulings pushing governments to increase emission reduction targets or strengthen climate policy implementation. However, this constitutionalized climate governance model often relies on mature rule of law structures, stable market institutions, and highly independent judicial systems (Peel & Osofsky, 2015). In contrast, the Ecological and Environmental Code embodies a different institutional logic, a comprehensive governance model centered on the administrative system. Under this model, climate governance does not primarily rely on judicial promotion or market regulation but, through mechanisms such as the target responsibility system, central ecological and environmental protection inspections, and performance assessment, embeds national emission reduction targets into local governance structures, thereby forming a policy system with relatively strong implementation capacity. For many developing countries facing both development pressures and emission reduction constraints, this pathway has stronger institutional feasibility. The model may be particularly instructive for “Global South” jurisdictions, including Vietnam, Indonesia, and Brazil, that combine relatively strong state mobilization capacity with still-developing market institutions and judicial systems. For such contexts, China’s experience suggests a replicable institutional logic: administrative integration of climate and pollution governance can generate meaningful enforcement effectiveness even absent the mature rule-of-law infrastructure that EU-style climate constitutionalism presupposes. This is not an argument for political imitation but a comparative claim about institutional feasibility under constrained conditions.

Second, China’s experience also highlights a point that comparative climate law scholarship has underemphasized: the effectiveness of climate legislation is not determined by statutory text alone but by the administrative capacity, infrastructure, monitoring and verification systems, data statistical frameworks, cross-agency coordination mechanisms, and grassroots enforcement capability that render statutory obligations operational. For many developing countries, the primary barrier to effective climate governance is not the absence of appropriate legal text but the absence of this implementing capacity. China’s codification experience, with its integrated approach to law and administrative capacity building, offers a model for addressing this implementation gap. China’s climate governance practice shows that legal provisions must be combined with institutional tools such as target decomposition, statistical monitoring, performance assessment, and accountability mechanisms to form a truly implementable governance system. For many developing countries, the biggest challenge facing climate legislation is often not the formulation of legal texts but the disconnect between legislation and implementation. Therefore, focusing on building and strengthening foundational governance capacities such as monitoring and verification systems, data statistical systems, cross-departmental coordination mechanisms, and grassroots enforcement capacity is no less important than climate legislation itself.

With the formal promulgation of the Ecological and Environmental Code, this law, embodying national will and systematic governance concepts, is about to enter the implementation phase under global attention. In the future, if this governance model rooted in Chinese practice can be proven effective in driving low-carbon transformation in such a vast country with significant regional development differences, it will powerfully demonstrate that developing countries can rely on their own administrative capacities to advance climate governance and also indicate that there is no single institutional model for global climate governance. On the contrary, as institutional experiences from different countries accumulate, global climate governance may gradually shift from a single paradigm long centered on Western institutions towards more diversified institutional competition and practical exploration.

7.3 Future Research Directions

The promulgation of the Ecological and Environmental Code marks China’s ecological and environmental governance entering a new stage of systematization and legalization, also providing a long-term stable legal foundation for green and low-carbon transformation. By integrating previously fragmented policies and regulations, it enhances the coherence and authority of the governance system and, through national targets and responsibility mechanisms, sends transformation signals to the whole society. However, translating the legislative blueprint into governance effectiveness remains a complex and long-term task requiring continuous improvement in practice. Future research can focus on the following directions to promote climate synergistic governance, moving from institutional construction to comprehensive effectiveness.

First, scholars should closely track the progressive elaboration of the Ecological and Environmental Code’s supporting regulatory layer, particularly the forthcoming Interim Regulations on Carbon Emissions Trading Administration and sector-specific EIA technical guidelines for GHG assessment. These sub-statutory instruments will determine whether the Ecological and Environmental Code’s climate provisions can operate with the procedural specificity and predictability that effective implementation requires. Comparative analysis of how supporting regulations in the EU ETS framework evolved after its enabling Directive may offer methodological insights.

Second, future research should systematically track how judicial authorities respond to the Ecological and Environmental Code’s synergy principle in environmental adjudication, specifically, whether courts invoke the Ecological and Environmental Code’s climate provisions as interpretive guides in pollution cases, and whether climate-related public interest litigation begins to generate precedents that operationalize the synergy principle in legally binding judicial reasoning. Comparative analysis with EU climate litigation trajectories post-KlimaSeniorinnen (Eckes, 2025) would contextualize China’s developing judicial role in climate governance.

Third, empirical research should examine the implementation of the synergy mechanism across industries and regions, assessing how high-carbon sectors (steel, electricity, cement) achieve co-reduction of pollutants and GHGs through technological transformation, and how local governments with different development profiles, resource endowments, and industrial compositions adapt synergy requirements to their governance contexts. This dimension is essential for converting the Ecological and Environmental Code’s institutional architecture into an evidence-based understanding of actual governance outcomes.

In summary, as an integrated piece of legislation, the success of the Ecological and Environmental Code lies not only in the systematization of its text but also in the synergistic evolution among legal norms, administrative supervision, technical support, and market mechanisms during the implementation process. In sum, the Ecological and Environmental Code represents a significant institutional experiment in climate governance, one whose ultimate effectiveness will be determined not by the elegance of its statutory architecture but by the quality of its implementation across thousands of administrative decisions, verification procedures, and enforcement actions over the coming decade. Tracking this implementation process with the analytical rigor that comparative governance scholarship demands is both an intellectual opportunity and, given the stakes of global climate governance, a scholarly obligation.

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